The Revenant
by TheAirbrushedCountess
Summary: Altered ending of The Force Awakens: The Resistance has captured Kylo Ren through Rey's valiant efforts, and Rey comes in to see him before leaving to find Luke Skywalker. MAJOR THE FORCE AWAKENS SPOILER WARNING. (This fanfiction is NOT Reylo.)


She's not sure why she has decided to go in to see him before leaving. A strange impulse, but one that she has decided not to question. The door squeaks as it slides open, admitting her to the hospital room-turned-prison cell.

He's been in a coma for the past thirteen days, recovering from his wounds. Her handiwork, she supposes. She approaches the foot of the durasteel-frame bed.

He has an IV taped to his arm, bacta seeping into his veins. A display screen beeps complacently, charting his heartbeat. He looks deceptively fragile in this state, though both arms are cuffed to the sides of the bed in case he awakes and attempts to escape. The doctors had protested at having an injured patient in the unsanitary holding cells, and the security officers had protested at having a dangerous killer in the same ward as wounded Resistance fighters. This was the compromise.

They need him for questioning when he recovers. There's no telling what kind of secrets his mind holds that could lead them to victory. Still, it unsettles Rey. A sense of Déjà Vu. Hadn't she been a prisoner to the First Order in almost exactly the same manner as this? She stares at his stitches-laden face, lost in thought.

So different from the harsh man she had fought in the forest.

Rey can sense him in the Force, if she tries. It is a subtle effect, like a quiet humming noise that has been there her whole life, one that she has only just begun to notice and pay attention to. He is strong in the Force indeed, terrifyingly so. But there is something else lying underneath. Pain, thinly veiled by uncontrolled power. Dangerous in that regard. Raw power driven by tumultuous emotion, a blunt instrument in the hands of Snoke and the First Order.

"Snoke really is using you, isn't he?" She murmurs, pointlessly. He can't hear her. "Just like Han said. And you weren't lying when you told him you were being torn apart..." She ponders the unconscious Kylo Ren lying in the hospital bed in front of her.

She shouldn't have come. She can't see that face, his face, without seeing Han Solo's face as he died. She turns to go, and punches in the access code to leave the room- yet another precaution that had been taken to avoid Kylo's escape.

"Wrong." A mumble, coming from the hospital bed. She whips around. His eyes are still closed, but it was his voice that spoke. "Snoke... Does not use me." His eyes open slowly. One of them only opens partially due to stitches.

"Y-you were in a coma." Rey says, shaken by his waking, backing up against the wall of the hospital room as the door slides shut, assuming she has already left.

"Force-induced. I figured out how to do that years ago, Jedi scum. I've been avoiding interrogation that way." He pulls himself up in the hospital bed, grimacing as the handcuffs slide along the bedrails with a screech of metal-on-metal to accommodate his movement. He continues calmly, "If anything, I am the one bending the First Order to my own purposes."

She tilts her head, silently examining him. His face is gaunt and pale, making his dark, harrowed eyes stand out. "I don't believe that," Rey says quietly. "Despite it all, I can't believe that you're doing all this evil all of your own accord. I still believe that there's good in you, if only because Han did." His eyes narrow dangerously at the mention of his father's name. "My father was a fool. The boy who had good in him- Ben Solo -is dead." Rey glares at him. "That's convenient," she says, contemptuously. "Convenient. What do you mean by that?" He glares back at her.

"I mean it must be very convenient that you consider the good in you to be gone. Easier to deal with the guilt of countless murders if you yourself have no conscience. But you don't, do you?" He is silent. "I sense that you're tired. Tired of hurt and of hurting, but you're buried too deep in a grave that you dug to forgive yourself." His black hair is plastered to his face, and he does his best to blow it out of his eyes. He seems resolved not to respond to her accusations. "There's a possibility that I'm wrong, and you're really the heartless monster that everyone thinks you are. But if I'm right about you... Talk to the interrogators. Despite having no reason in the known universe to do so, General Leia wants you back as a son, and they'll let you turn over a new leaf if you tell them everything you know." He stares at her with a visage marked by the haunting of a twisted past, and she thinks she sees a flicker of hesitation before he responds.

"No."

"No, you're not a monster, no, you're not going to talk to the interrogators, or no, you don't believe me that despite it all, you can still be forgiven?" Rey asks quietly.

"Take your pick," he growls.

She sighs gently. "You're going to have to choose, you know. Eventually. Is it harder to live with the guilt, or to try to change? Have you forgotten that I saw inside your mind? I know that's the question that looms in your thoughts constantly."

"Life's determined to be hard either way. Nothing I do will change that." He stares down at his wrists, shackled to the bed. "I don't know why I'm even talking to you. Or why I came out of the coma at all, for that matter," he spits, pointedly avoiding her gaze.

"And I don't know why I came here instead of just leaving to find Skywalker. The Force works in mysterious ways.

After a brief staredown, he mutters something too softly for her to hear. "What?" She asks. He simply glares in response.

"Fine. I'll go." She walks out the door, keying in the code to leave.

He repeats himself, and she hears it this time. "No, I'm not a monster." She walks out, though, pretending that she didn't hear. He didn't want her to hear. But there is something in them both that was missing before their encounter: Hope.

Hope in her that good can never truly die, that a person is never too far gone even in a prison cell of their own making.

Hope in him that pain is not infinite. That escape from the labyrinth of suffering he has pulled himself and others into might be possible, if he so chose.

Hope in the Resistance, hope in human life. Hope is what makes living beings tick, what brings laughter and happiness to our lives, what keeps us smiling in the times when we are without light- to create a place where even our own darkness fears to tread.


End file.
